Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly. Joan Didion
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. Virginia Woolf
Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing. Michael Connelly
Now, all writing - all the arts - are a form of 'Pay attention to me,' but there's also the flip side. Like, I want to give something. Let me entertain you, let me amuse you, let me try to please you with this thing I've made. And then pay attention to me. Jonathan Ames
Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time. Matthew Tobin Anderson
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I'm writing them. For instance, when I was writing 'Doctor Dee,' I believed in magic. And when I wrote 'Hawksmoor' I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I'm back to being a complete blank again. Peter Ackroyd
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.' Matthew Tobin Anderson
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the biggest motivations for me with writing my books is to offer girls some escapism, especially girls who really need it, like I did. Meg Cabot
One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. John Green
One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book. Justin Cronin
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing. Harlan Coben
Part of my motivation for writing mysteries for young people is that I loved mysteries when I was growing up, and now that I'm on the creative end of things, I'm discovering that they're even more fun to write! Wendelin Van Draanen
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. Martin Amis
Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that. Pearl Cleage
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw. Margaret Atwood
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well. Margaret Atwood
Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that? Martin Amis